Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Has anyone calculated like "the odds" of it probabalistically?
If you take standard cosmological assumptions (the universe is infinite and homogeonous) then the odds are 100% as everything that is physically possible happens infinite times.
unless you mean the observable universe, in which case we dont know, but given the vast scale of it is likely very close to 1. We cant calculate it without knowing how likely life is to form in the first place.
I'm not sure exactly how else you might calculate it, but, we know life is possible, so in an infinitely large universe, containing infinite stars with infinite planets existing for an infinite amount of time, the odds of life existing on another planet can't be less than 100%.
The Drake Equation is a probabilistic formula meant to derive the number of civilizations which humans could potentially communicate with.
The fermi paradox does challenge the formula though, as it implies fi and/or fc are very small or zero.
What if the earth is a singular and universal outlier?
That's just arrogant.
Please subtract the assumptions and respond to specific claim. Life is a lottery. What are the equivalent chances of that in coinflips analogy and then give the response in the approximate amount of times that could happen over an eternity or minimally the "death of our galaxy or universe" context
I'll break it down further.
We know life is possible, because we're here.
Nobody knows the exact odds of life being created, but we know it's >0. One in a billion? Trillion?
So imagine a trillion sided die. If you roll a 1, life is created.
If you get only one chance, you probably aren't creating life, but if you are allowed to roll the die constantly from the instant of the big bang, until the end of time, you WILL roll a one. Now, imagine an infinite number of planets rolling an infinite number of trillion sided dice for billions of years.
Sure, it's very unlikely for any individual roll to be 1, but it's downright IMPOSSIBLE for NONE of them to EVER roll it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that there are aliens flying around and probing people. I don't believe that's true at all. But there is life out there. Maybe it's just plants or bacteria, or some form of living rock that we've never encountered before, but it's out there.
I say it's arrogant because Earth is a tiny insignificant speck in the universe, and assuming that only YOUR planet can randomly produce life is a very self centered point of view.
Bold of you to assume life on earth originated on earth.
For life in general I would agree but for human level intelligence I'm not so sure, in our galaxy anyway. The number of things that had to line up for us to be the dominant lifeform on the planet is enormous.
Goldilocks zone. Life. Large outer gas giants. Complex life (someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe this has only happened once in 4B years / all complex lifeforms have a common ancestor) Oxygen tolerant life. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Multiple mass extinctions. Planet habitable for enormously long periods. Evolution of large brains for the first time. Etc
Chances are they won't be oxygen breathers anyway.
Do we already have that with the crazy anerobic volcano or the high-temperature deep sea vent dwelling microorganisms or something?
Don’t be too sure about that. If you look around online, you should be able to find chemistry predictions for intelligent life. While not assuming any compatible chemistry, we can look at some of the basic types of reactions needed to support a life form and the type of environment we assume. Apparently carbon and oxygen based chemistry is most favorable
We don't have enough data about the frequency of life to say for sure, since we only have one data point (our planet). If we knew more about how life can arise originally, then perhaps we could make a prediction.
It was calculated decades ago. I remember Carl Sagan talking about it.
I think you're referring to the Drake Equation, but that's more of a thought experiment, there's no way to calculate any of the required probabilities inputted to the equation to be able to calculate the output.